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Hume: The Melbourne supremacy and the livable city

According to the former, streets are nothing less than the key to a livable city. According to the latter, they are nothing more than a way for cars to get from one place to another.

The difference is that Adams knows what he’s talking about.

In the 25 years since he was appointed Melbourne’s director of city design, Adams has gained international prominence for turning around the fortunes of Australia’s second city. Once a Victorian industrial powerhouse, Melbourne entered a period of decline at the end of the 19th century. By the 1960s, it had become Australia’s designated Doughnut City, a Rust Belt metropolis with a big hole in the middle where people used to live and work.

Things went from bad to worse until a new generation of civic leaders took office in the 1980s and decided to do thing differently. For starters, they hired Rob Adams. His approach, radical though it might have seemed, was to focus on small stuff, everything from trees and benches to sidewalks and street vendors. Enshrining urban design concepts such as “active frontage” and shared streets, Adams transformed the city building by building, block by block, bylaw by bylaw.

Rejecting the post-war planning orthodoxies of single-use zoning and vehicular paramountcy, he insisted the streets be shared with pedestrians and cyclists. Despite the backlash, it worked. Last year, The Economist magazine named Melbourne, and Toronto, among the five most livable cities on Earth.

Adams, whose fame reaches well beyond the antipodes, is in Toronto to give talks on Tuesday at Metro Hall and the Design Exchange.

Depending on your point of view, the timing couldn’t be better — or worse. Adams’ story is one with which Torontonians will be eerily familiar. And although it’s too early to talk about endings, happy or otherwise, at this point it does seem the two cities are headed in different directions.

Melbourne’s success has reached the point where even the current car-friendly mayor has become an advocate for pedestrians, cyclists and streetcars. By contrast, Toronto’s new chief magistrate wants them removed from the roads as soon as possible,

So much for the idea of Toronto the Progressive and Canada the Compassionate. Those days are over, at least for the time being.

But as Adams makes clear, the Melbourne supremacy is not a matter of opinion or ideology; the results can be measured and the effects catalogued.

Sidewalks have been widened, streets closed to traffic and zoning loosened. The population has doubled in recent years. Unemployment in Melbourne is five per cent; in Toronto, 9.5 per cent.

“The theory is that people should be on the street,” Adams explains. “The street is the key to the city. If you design good streets, you design a good city. You’ve got to be strategic about what streets to close. I’m not a fan of pedestrian malls. We asked why we don’t take away a lane from streets and plant more trees. Our large roads are 30 metres wide so we widened sidewalks by three and a half metres on both sides. Retail benefits from street closures.”

And as Adams points out, street transit — trams — remains a big part of Melbourne street life.

“At one point they wanted to move our trams underground,” he says. “We moved the cars instead. When the current lord mayor promised to put cars back on the main street, 70 per cent of people said no. That would have meant fewer trees and narrower sidewalks.”

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